


Never Better

by Edoro



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, internalized prejudice, the sad reality of Vriska Serket
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-03
Updated: 2012-05-03
Packaged: 2017-11-04 18:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Tavros Nitram, and you've always been never quite good enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Better

Head pillowed on your arms, you spend your sleeping time somewhere halfway between dark easiness and the blood splatter of dreams. You dream of flying, soaring through the wispy midnight clouds with something huge and hot and vicious at your back. You dream of killing, with your lance and with your hands and with your teeth, the thick tear of flesh and metallic spurt of blood down your throat.

You dream of being something better.

You’re never better, though. You’re just always not good enough. Too clumsy, too hesitant, too stupid - too _low_ , too dirt-shit-mud brown. 

You dream of fairies because there are worlds where dirt is the color of life and welcome and shelter. You dream of flying because everyone is small if you’re above them. 

In your games at least you can be a little better. In your games you can be fast, and strong, and sure, and you can revel in the endless joy of rushing down your enemies through an open field and the vicious delight of _winning_. In your games you _can_ win.

They say color doesn’t matter, in FLARP. You know it’s a lie, because color always matters, but they say it doesn’t. You and Aradia talk about that, sometimes, rolling eyes at each other and grinning like it’s just a funny joke. It has to be a funny joke because otherwise you’ll cry, big blubbery inelegant streaks of filthy brown all down your face like a little baby wiggler, because it _does_ matter and it makes you so mad, sometimes.

You dream of a rainbow in shades of brown and red and nothing else. You dream about wearing it proud for everyone to see the way Aradia does with her makeup, like she doesn’t even know how ugly a color red is. Once you dream about standing in a puddle of deep cerulean with it dripping off your hands and face and clothes and you wake up so scared that someone will know you thought about that, but you keep the dream anyway. You tuck it close to your heart and take it out sometimes when you’re really mad.

Vriska’s like a hurricane. She beats into your life the way the frantic storm spray beats itself to rainbows and mist against your cliff, and topples you the way the winds threaten to topple your hive. She’s inescapable, irresistible, unutterable. She’s this lovely vicious tumble of hair and fangs and ratty clothes too big for her.

She’s smaller than you but she never looks small, to you. Her grin is wider than your eyes can see, sometimes. Her voice feels as big as the ocean, sometimes, like you’ll drown in it if you’re not careful.

She’s an iceberg, she’s a riptide, and you are no survivors; lost at sea, you’re pulled under no matter how careful you try to be. You drown in her.

Vriska Serket makes you fly.

You start crying again. Your dreams are all white and empty and brown-tinged with pain, reality eating in at the edges of them. You sleep as long as you can and then stay in your recuperacoon half-awake for even longer. You are wracked with numbness, plagued by nothing, bereft and bereaved and listless with it.

You were never better and now you can’t be. You play at catatonia for months. In dreams you fly over and over again off the edge of your cliff and in dreams you relive over and over again that single brilliant weightless moment, and you want to hate her so badly you ache with it but there’s nothing. Falling knocked the heart right out of you. It’s there in splinters on that rubbly beach, washing out to sea.

You surface slow and viscous and threatening to burst open. You’re a swamp bubble growing thin around the edges. You’re mud with delusions of life. There’s a vast dark well inside you full of all the things you’re numb to now, the grief and anger and deep abiding hurt. The rough stone lip of it scrapes against the inside of your head, sometimes, but mostly you just don’t feel. You don’t feel a lot of things, anymore.

Time doesn’t care enough to stop for you. Sometimes in the disjointed place between sleep and dreaming, when you feel phantom nerves on fire with aching, you bet it would stop for someone better, someone higher. You’re wet dirt, you’re made to be stepped on. You throw those thoughts in the well and work on living while you can. 

She took your life and gave you a flight and then a timer. You keep it tucked far away so you can’t hear it ticking, but you feel it anyway. 

It breaks you out of numbness. It scrapes and scratches at your awareness until you can’t help but feel. The places where you used to fit in life don’t quite fit anymore, but you squeeze back into them, rubbing raw up against new boundaries. Life’s too short to spend missing.

You keep your well, though. It’s the new skeleton of you, straight and unbroken. You put your back against it and smile out at the world. You layer all your new life over the smooth surface of it.

You fall back in during the game, when you don’t kill her. Always not enough. You kneel in a puddle of her blood and don’t feel it soaking through your pants and do feel it streaking your face and hands, cool against the burn of frayed fingertips and torn nails, and you are not enough. 

Even in death she isn’t dirt, like you, isn’t small, like you. She’s huge and terrible and her voice shrieks like a splitting hull in your mind, _kill me kill me k8ll m8 K8LL M8_ but you can’t. She took that from you as surely as she took your legs and life.

You run away and curl up and sleep and dream of flying in a golden city. There’s no mud and no blue and no wicked slips of legendary girls biting through your mind, no venom to be pumped through you. Just gold and glitz and glitter and the delicate jointed little dots of people below your soaring self.

You wake up inside your well again, fingers digging into the lip. You’re not ready to let go, yet. 

They try to fix you, all your beautiful brave friends who are so much more than you could ever be. They try in blood and pain and metal. They give you back half of what she took. Sometimes when you walk you feel heavier than you ever did in your chair and you want to cry for all you’ve lost but you can’t, you’re desert-dry and stinging wrung-out, tight and hot behind your eyes and in your chest.

You slip, you are slipping, your fingers scraped raw from holding so tight onto rough stone. You kick your legs but they’re so heavy now, unimaginable weight tethered to you and yanking you down like gravity towards the bottom. You try but you’re not good enough.

Every time she speaks to you you slip a little more and you think a little harder about just letting go. Your hands hurt and your shoulders ache. You are tired of having weight. You want to sink, you want the effortless buoyant float of drowning.

She speaks and you slip. She speaks and you slip.

She laughs and you let go.

All your hidden feelings, all the tears and rage and pitch, all swirl up around and welcome you like lost family. You’re pulled down and then borne up and held still, suspended weightless and secure. Your anger burns you cold through and you finally think you understand what hate is like and it is not black at all. It’s a wide blue pulse threading behind your eyes and in your teeth and down to your fingers and feet, blue pounding on your tongue, blue inside your head.

You think about your dream again, the one you kept stitched into your heart like a secret jewel. You take it out and turn it over and think about the times you’ve failed, all the times you couldn’t face her, and then you throw it away. You have no dreams anymore, none of you, and it isn’t right for you to keep one.

You’ll make it a memory instead. You rise up with your lance and all your shaking determination. With every step you mine that core of rushing blue hate inside yourself; you draw on it to make your steps light instead of hard and dragging, to keep your body from shaking itself apart from the inside. 

You’re not scared of her anymore until that split second when you realize she is bigger than you, she really is and always has been. For just a moment her face is twisted ugly with her wrath for you and then it’s just her same old grin, all those teeth stretching wide past the edges of her face and wrapping around you. She disarms you so easily it’s like you handed the lance to her. Part of you wonders if you did.

You’re always not good enough.

You’re whole when you wake up again, walking now through the land of the dreaming dead. You try out the memory of your chair but it doesn’t want to stick. You try out the memory of your new legs, briefly, but they ache and itch and don’t fit right and you throw them off as soon as you can.

You’re just you, now, perfectly inadequate and unable like you always were and not one jot more. Never better but not worse, either, not anymore. You died as close to yourself as you’ve felt in a long time and now you stay dead as even more yourself, with all the trappings of what other people made you be stripped away.

Dave is unkind to you in an easy way you realize has no bite to it. All his worst words are empty and propped up on nothing. You learn the difference between hurting to hurt and hurting for defense and hurting just to have something to say.

You remember your hive and the recuperacoon you could never fit in and, so welcome you could almost weep after so long, the cool and thick embrace of sopor. It’s all pretend, you guess, your whole afterlife and everything in it, but you guess it doesn’t matter if you’re pretending as long as you feel okay. It’s like FLARP, except you think here when everyone’s dead color really doesn’t matter.

You dream uneasy double dreams in the memory of sleep. You dream blood and hurt and murder. You dream of a grief and rage so big you can’t contain them, can only sit and watch in dumb silence as they rampage through you. 

You dream the silence of a finished killing field and wake unsure, wondering if dreamers dream of waking when they sleep. 

At first you’re angry when you get pulled out. Everything is good inside your dreambubble. You’ve made yourself a home where you forget your friends and what you left behind. You forget the scheming and plotting and fussing and bugging and all the ways everybody struggled and hurt each other. You forget about the colors and the way they’d stack up on top of each other, a big wobbly pile of injustice with one lone success perched precariously up at the time, looking benevolently down at all the mud and shit and failure beneath her.

You forget about living and dying. You fill in your well. You have Dave and Aradia when she comes by and all the other sleeping dead to keep you company. You aren’t _ready_.

Then you remember the way living felt, the pull of air into your lungs and the raw vitalness of being. In death you’re a shadow puppet projection of your memory of yourself in worlds stitched together from vague recollections of a life you barely got to live. Even as a sprite you’re more real.

You crackle with it, burn with it, you’re torn apart with it. You can’t handle the sudden shock of reality and the weight of existing, not when your own mind is tearing at itself in desperate struggling attempts to flee. You’re the spider and the fly and the web and the careless swat of a hand that undoes it, all at once.

You elide yourself down to a flayed catastrophe and then explode out into separate beings again. She sits across from you, your mirror, and for a moment you are terrified again. She was so large and so sure.

Then you remember how it felt to be her. She is terror on the inside, all torn apart with the desperate searing need to be brilliant and the knowledge that in the end she will never be more than bright. Vriska Serket’s core is a disaster that never stops happening. She’s never been good enough either.

You were both so terrified of her for so long.

You look at her and you think you actually see her for the first time, and oh, she is small.


End file.
